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It’s an important development for Nativity Co-Cathedral and the Sauver La Nativite committee that formed over a year ago to save it.

Committee members have announced Apostolic administrator Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, in a letter dated Feb. 1 addressed to priest Rev. Emmanuel Ngiruwonsanga, has approved several measures, including Nativity Co-Cathedral operating its own administration, thereby allowing it to assist parishioners, and others, with mass requests, baptism certificates and any other inquiries.

“We’re extremely pleased (to make the announcement),” committee member Robert Brunet said.

“We achieved our goals of having the Nativity Co-Cathedral not just reopen, but now we can operate it separately ourselves, with our own (Nativity Co-Cathedral) committees.”

The Sauver La Nativite committee sat down with the archbishop last September regarding the future of Nativity Co-Cathedral, presenting a petition with over 1,275 names and asking he reopen it as a fully functioning parish.

“We met with (Prendergast) for an hour,” Brunet recounted on Monday. “He was open, he listened to us, he told us we would get an answer.”

The answer came quickly, and it accomplished the committee’s first mission, to have the parish reopen, and the first mass was held in October.

Brunet said there was also a meeting this past January, with the various committees talking with the archbishop.

It was two years ago and just a few days before Christmas in 2015 when former Alexandria-Cornwall Diocese Bishop Marcel Damhousse suspended the use of Nativity Co-Cathedral due to a structural problem with the choir loft. The huge Casavant organ, weighing 40,000 pounds and with over 1,400 pipes, sits on the choir loft and the structural issues posed a potential danger for parishioners.

By late in the summer of 2016, the structural problems with the loft had been repaired, new beams running horizontally under it, and beams that run all the way to the ground under the church.

The parishioners expected the church to reopen, “but this never happened,” Brunet said last September. “We had been informed that after (the repair), putting in a new heating system, along with repair of the front steps, that Nativity Co-Cathedral was going to reopen with full regular services.”

Brunet and the committee argued Nativity Co-Cathedral shouldn’t be one of the churches the diocese closes, because of its history and the fact it’s been a cornerstone for the French population of Cornwall and the area.

The Feb. 1 letter indicates the administration will do its own accounting, will publish its own parish bulletin, have its own committees, will have Ngiruwonsanga preside over weekly masses, and in addition to the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass, there’ll be an option of adding a Saturday Mass in the near future.

The Sauver La Nativite committee is made up of Brunet, Jeanne Scott, Odette Lawrence and Michael Lawrence.